My name is Bela Filstrup, and I am currently an undergraduate student in the Earth and Planetary Science department at Northwestern University. I am from New York City.
In high school, I was lucky enough to have a lot of experiences that peaked my interest in climate change. Working with the Coral Restoration Foundation in the Florida Keys and seeing the human driven impacts of climate change on the natural world really inspired me to become more involved with the movement. Junior year, I spent a semester in Maine at an environmentally focused semester school where I participated in field labs and took courses encompassing climate issues. I got the opportunity during the summer of 2021 to participate in a Sea Education Association program in Woods Hole. There, and aboard the SS Cramer sailing around the New England Coast, I helped with microbiology research and monitoring projects.
I currently work in the Climate Change Research Group (CCRG), advised by Professor Dan Horton and graduate student Victoria Lang. My research goals are to incorporate distribution centers into air quality models by making a spatial surrogate to ultimately create a more accurate map of air quality in the United States.
